it’s really sad that we’ve come to asking questions like this.

I suggest getting RSS feeds from your subscriptions from Invidious. This way you won’t directly connect to Google’s servers.

Why is it useless for YouTube?

Use their SOCKS5 proxy. Haven,'t encountered any issues on Freetube since then.

There’s also Migadu which I currently use. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that providers like Proton and Tuta have with their E2EE but they don’t use any shady marketing or track you. Requires a custom domain though.

I recommend switching to a custom domain in the future so you can avoid situations like this from happening again, this way you won’t be locked down onto a single provider.

They have a large following on Mastodon so this doesn’t really make much sense. I’m inclined to believe that they left due to the hate they were getting because of the recent controversy.

This.

I never said anything about E2EE. Please re-read what I wrote carefully.

No support for Monero despite it being requested on uservoice 6 years ago. A Bitcoin wallet (seriously?) which is easily traceable. Important email metadata is also not zero access encrypted (i.e., subject headers, from/to headers) which leaks a substantial amount of information even if the body is encrypted. Not to mention they had clearnet redirects from their onion service a while back, something a lot of honeypots usually do.

Even if it’s not a honeypot, you’re sure as hell not getting any privacy with Proton. That’s for sure.

Well, I disagree about Signal. Proton however, I agree is extremely shady and should be avoided at all costs.

Something at which even the original Signal fails. It has received criticism multiple times (1, 2) for not being verifiable whether it’s been tampered with by the app’s distributor, and also for having included properietary google services dependencies which dynamically load further code from the phone which is also a security issue. Worthy forks solve both of these.

That’s unfortunate. I do hope that these forks don’t go and start making extensive changes though, because that’s where it becomes a problem.

Again, having third party clients would not definitively mean the client is bad. Obviously, if it’s a simple fork with hopefully small patches that are just UI changes, it’s probably not going to harm the security model.

I should have phrased this better in my original post. When I was thinking about third party clients, Matrix and XMPP immediately came to my mind. Not very simple forks. So I’ll phrase this better: “Having non-trivial third party clients is not good for security.” What non-trivial means is left to interpretation though, I suppose.

Also do give citations for your bombastic claim that most people don’t want anonymity.

This is entirely dependent on the situation. Privacy is not a black or white thing where you’re completely private or not private at all. Everyone lives some part of their life publicly. I don’t have data on this unfortunately, but typically where I live, people share phone numbers to people they personally know.

The graph of who communicates with whom is precisely the problem. The government can easily correlate that data with all the other data they have on people, and then if somebody is identified as a person of interest it becomes easy to find other people who associate with them. So, here you just proved my point by showing that you yourself don’t understand the implications of metadata harvesting.

This is not within the vast majority of most peoples threat model.

When you use a client, you are relying on the client’s crypto implementation to be correct. This is only one part of it and there’s a lot more to it when it comes to hardening the program. Signal focuses on their desktop and mobile clients and they hire actual security professionals and cryptographers (unlike the charlatans in this thread) to implement it correctly.

Having third party clients would not definitively mean the client is bad, but it most likely would break the security model. Just take a look at Matrix’s clients.

Seriously, what are you talking about? The vast majority of people don’t want anonymity. Obviously Signal isn’t cut out for that! The fact is, most people don’t care about anonymity.

And what metadata can you harvest exactly from a UNIX timestamp and phone number? Signal can tell who is communicating to who, but they cannot read your messages.

What? How is this a red flag? Having third party clients is not good for security.

It’s Proton. What do you expect?

“There are so many things you can do. Don’t accept doing nothing, be a stubborn fuck and do something to alleviate the sadness.”

Good words to live by. :)

In contrast to my experience, all the other search engines stink. Google is the only good one. But I suggest using a frontend like Araa if you want privacy.